Industrialization_Mass_Consumption_Postindustrial_Society

Industrialization,M ass Consum ption,Post-industrialSociety

Oxford Handbooks Online

Industrialization, Mass Consumption, Post-industrial Society

Donna Hirsch

The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History

Edited by Helmut Walser Smith

Abstract and Keywords

This article provides an overview of post-industrial German society. how industrialization came across, mass consumption, and how the post-industrial German society fared. Framed by the postwar crisis and early Cold War rivalry, debate about the future of German class society began almost as soon as the war ended. Americans assured despairing Germans that the ‘free market’ would generate prosperity and foster social fairness. Communists promised the hungry masses that expropriation and the nationalization of industry would create social equality and forge economic expansion. After 1949, the two Germanys continued to embody competition between capitalism and communism. The fate of class society in each state always provoked debate, with several points of consensus emerging from a discussion increasingly centered on social and economic data, not crude propaganda. Both societies experienced an attenuation of socially-distinctive life styles. An assessment of the change and continuity in German society between 1945 and 1990 concludes this article.

Keywords: industrialization, mass-consumption, post-war crisis, Cold War, free market, capitalism, communism

FRAMED by the postwar crisis and early Cold War rivalry, debate about the future of German class society began almost as soon as the war ended. Americans assured despairing Germans that the ‘free market’ would generate prosperity and foster social fairness. Communists promised the hungry masses that expropriation and nationalization of industry would create social equality and forge economic expansion. The former Allies and their German allies hotly disputed the meaning of economic prosperity and social equity, and how to attain them. Yet each side insisted that its system would deliver both and criticized old Germany for having failed to do so. Americans blamed its national peculiarities, while Communists condemned its class nature, but their critiques overlapped: German society was stratified, hierarchical, and loaded in favor of birthright. In the eyes of Americans and their German acolytes, the solution was to generate a wide, deep middle-class. Communists planned to fix class society by smashing the bourgeoisie and elevating the working-class.1

After 1949, the two Germanys continued to embody competition between capitalism and Communism. The fate of class society in each state always provoked debate, with several points of consensus emerging from a discussion increasingly centered on social and economic data, not crude propaganda. Both societies experienced an attenuation of sociallydistinctive life styles. Germany's richly articulated ‘workers' culture,’ for example, never completely revived after National Socialist repression.2 Scholars attribute these cultural changes to postwar economic prosperity. While the standard of living eventually rose in both societies, its increase in the Federal Republic (FRG) was astonishing. West Germany's national income quadrupled between 1950 and 1980, a (p. 664) steeper rise than in any other Western economy. Prosperity generated impressive income benefits for all sectors of society. There occurred, in the words of Rainer Geiβler, an ‘explosion in prosperity.’3

Beyond these conclusions, scholarly opinion divided along the earlier line of dispute: prosperity versus equality. Scholars debated whether the extraordinary increase in the West German standard of living was the main protagonist, indeed, the hero of postwar social development in both Germanys. Yes, answered one school of interpretation: the rising tide lifted all boats, drowning class society—and finally swamping East German socialism as well. Its adherents accepted, if with

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qualification, the claim by the sociologist Helmut Schelsky that a ‘leveled middle-class society’ was emerging in West Germany and other market-industrial societies by the mid-1950s.4 No, responded members of the counter-interpretive school: the size of the boats still mattered despite prosperity. Social inequalities persisted, its adherents argued, and shaped the evolution of West German society after 1945.5 Working in the tradition of critical societal analysis, they drew on Max Weber's understanding of class as an ‘interest-camp’ related to a ‘way of life’ and a porous sense of belonging. To interpret cultural milieus, they turned to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of socially-grounded ‘fine distinctions.’6

East German society has been studied less than society in the FRG, although recent research has partially closed the gap. East Germany, studies have agreed, experienced a massive initial compression of vertical social divisions. Most Western scholars criticized this sudden, repressive equalization for creating a ‘de-differentiated’ society or a ‘society leveled toward below.’ They recognized that, nonetheless, the economy grew and the standard of living rose significantly before stagnation set in after 1970. The West German ‘rising tide,’ acknowledged scholars of all persuasions, influenced the social-cultural history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).7

This chapter assesses change and continuity in German society between 1945 and 1990. Adopting the critical societal perspective, it treats disparities based on income, occupation, gender, and ethnicity as integral to the story. It is a comparative in two senses: it compares the social development of West and East Germany, and, where the data permit, it also considers the Germanys in relation to other industrial societies, especially in Western Europe. Structural similarity justifies comparison between the Germanys despite their different economic and social systems. It also justifies comparison between the Germanys and Western Europe despite their different wartime histories. In both Germanys, as well as throughout Western Europe, the form and function of the family, for example, tended to converge on the model of the nuclear family. All of these economies, moreover, experienced intense industrialization and, as a consequence, mobilized major new sources of labor. Not only Western Europe, but East Germany made the transition into mass consumption. Each country also had to adapt to the end of the industrial boom after 1970. In sections on the postwar crisis, the family, economic trends, the remaking of the working class, social inequalities, and mass consumption, this chapter explores the interactions between dynamic structural conditions, social homogenization, and social differentiation. It ends with a brief consideration of the fate of class society in reunified Germany.

(p. 665) 29.1 Social consequences of the Second World War

The most significant social novelty for defeated Germany in 1945 was the massive influx of German refugees and expellees from the Sudetenland, Poland, and further east. Four million refugees settled in the eastern zone of occupation, while eight million migrated directly to the western zones. Eventually, a significant minority of those in the GDR moved westward (as part of the migration of three million people from East to West in the 1950s). Initially, though, both societies experienced a major infusion of non-native, German-speaking settlers who had to be integrated as workers and citizens. In 1950, these displaced, dispossessed people comprised about 20 percent of the East German and 17 percent of the West German population. What began as a gigantic burden became, however, a demographic advantage that fed industrial expansion and urbanization in the FRG and the GDR.8 In 1960, 40 percent of the West German workforce was comprised of German-speaking immigrants, including expellees, refugees, and migrants from the GDR.9 They manifested, according to the many studies of them, a distinctive mix of social behaviors. To regain former levels of income, refugees formed interest-groups that demanded state resources to ‘balance’ their losses. They also worked hard to ‘make it’ and fit in. Nonetheless, it took two generations for the majority of immigrants to pull even with native-born Germans. Parents cultivated in their children bourgeois values such as obedience, order, and ‘decency.’ Yet, far from elitist, refugees were perceived as scrappy and ‘striving.’ They nurtured customs from their ‘Heimat,’ even as they intermarried with natives at a steady clip.10

We know little about refugees in the GDR, for the SED did not treat them as a separate statistical category. It is clear that in the East, as in the West, large numbers of refugees quickly left rural areas where many were initially settled and took jobs in expanding industries in growing towns. Indirect evidence suggests that refugees who stayed in the GDR were well-integrated into the wider society by the 1960s—perhaps even better than in the West, for they could not form identity-cultivating refugee associations and lived in a society where everyone with wealth had lost it.11

A lopsidedly female adult population was a major demographic consequence of the war. The percentage of femaleheaded households remained high into the mid-1950s, especially in the GDR. All zones of occupation experienced a decline in fertility, a surge in infant mortality, and a leap in divorce, all of which prompted alarm and natalist policies in

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both states. As postwar turmoil subsided, the divorce rate declined, the birth rate rose, and many more babies survived in both Germanys—and elsewhere in Europe. To summarize, the war, postwar crisis, and emerging economic expansion unleashed significant demographic trends which generally moved in tandem in the 1950s.12 There was an important exception to these parallels: the population of the FRG grew not only from natural increase, but also from the continuing immigration of German-speakers, while the GDR's natural increase was annulled by emigration to the (p. 666) West. FRG gains from this infusion of skilled and educated laborers were impressive, but nothing like the demographic and economic losses experienced by the much smaller GDR.13

29.2 The family

In addition to early crises, East and West Germany shared the enduring social formation of the nuclear family. Popular attachment to the family ran high after the war, nurtured by its extraordinary contribution to members' survival during upheaval and dearth. The family's hierarchical structure also emerged more or less unscathed. During the crisis women often constituted the bulwark of this ‘vital community of solidarity,’ yet this accomplishment did not translate into egalitarian gender relations inside the revitalized family. In both Germanys, as generally in the Western world, wives enjoyed less leisure time than husbands because they performed the lion's share of child care and household work.14

Certainly, the war and postwar crisis left marks on the family. Home became, for example, more central to male socializing, especially in working-class households, where husbands and fathers had earlier spent their scant free time in pubs or workers' organizations. The ‘retreat into the family,’ argues Josef Mooser, narrowed the social disparities of everyday life. The retreat is harder to perceive in East Germany. In the 1950s, when family advancement rested on the husband's shoulders, many men engaged in the political activity necessary for political and occupational success. Pressure to take part in public rituals, as well as shortages that placed a premium on family-based ‘organization,’ fed a tendency in the East, however, to depend on the family and withdraw into it to escape politicized activities.15

Meanwhile, changes in the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of domestic labor narrowed differences in the private routines of socially disparate women. Throughout Europe the percentage of families with a live-in servant fell after World War I and collapsed after World War II. Middle-strata women now performed much of their own housework and, in this regard, became more like worker-women.16 As the era of full-time servants ended, the age of the mechanized household began. Before 1945, the rationalization of housework reached only solidly bourgeois homes in Europe, in contrast to wider expansion in the United States. The trend widened, however, in the 1950s and took off in the 1960s, including in East Germany (in contrast to most other socialist states). As the use of labor-saving devices spread down the social ladder, the domestic life of the working-class woman became more like that of her middle-class counterpart.17

These homogenizing tendencies were related to a major change with leveling effects across social groups and inside the family: the rise in married women's workforce participation. In 1970, East Germany had the highest rate of female employment in the industrialized world. Especially indicative of a break with the past was the high rate of employment among mothers. In 1967, 55 percent of women with three or more children (p. 667) at home worked for wages.18 While the GDR (along with Norway and the USSR, for example) was ahead of a curve that has profoundly affected society in the postwar era, the FRG lagged behind it. Married mothers moved into paid employment much more slowly than in the GDR or than in the United States, and many countries in Europe. Given the durable myth that West German wives retreated to the kitchen, it is important to emphasize that their participation in the workforce did increase. In 1950, 25 percent of wives worked for wages; in 1960, 32.8 percent did; in 1970, 35.2 percent did.19 Both societies experienced several developments that weakened the pre-war correlation between women's employment and their marital status as single women or their comparatively low economic status. These included increasing part-time work by wives, educated women's tendency to work at a high rate combined with rising levels of female education, and a decline in the birth rate after 1965. It became more common for women of every social group, marital status, and maternal situation to work outside the family. Along with these trends came a shift in the meaning of women's waged labor: an employed wife or mother did not necessarily signify low status and/or an inadequate male provider, but might denote individual inclination or a cultural value (such as commitment to women's equality or to family mobility). These changes happened gradually, accompanied by tensions inside the family and, especially in the FRG, public agonizing over the cultural dangers associated with (married) mothers' employment.20

The rise in women's employment was associated with greater gender equality inside the family, if not to the degree feared by conservative opponents or hoped by Communist, Social Democratic, or feminist supporters. The ‘partnership

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marriage’ became the norm—spouses consulted each other about important family decisions, and there occurred some, if not much, redistribution of household labor and childrearing responsibilities. These trends went further in the GDR, but not dramatically so. When a husband was violent, obstructive, or otherwise inadequate in an employed wife's eyes, she often got a divorce, another trend that was more common in the GDR than the FRG, although not more so than in the USSR, United States, or Sweden.21 These social trends accompanied growing prosperity. The lure of mass consumption motivated wives' employment, especially in West Germany. Higher levels of workforce participation also motivated women to buy labor-saving devices, especially in East Germany. Whether consumption nudged female employment forward or the other way around, the data show that appliances were the first ‘big ticket’ items purchased by households in both Germanys—and in France and the UK. German interviewees often recall the exact date when they bought their first refrigerator or washing machine and also remember the purchase as a postwar caesura, according to Michael Wildt. Women's family-based labor, thus, shaped consumer habits that were trend-setting and memory-making in the early phase of postwar consumerism—and no wonder given that in the early 1950s women spent from eight (GDR) to twelve (FRG) hours a day doing housework.22

Social and economic changes (and state policies) in West and East took place to different degrees and at different paces, gradually shaping an East German family (p. 668) different from its West German counterpart. In 1989, East German families were likelier to have an employed wife, be headed by a single mother, and include more children. Still, the typical family was not strikingly different in East and West. Key trends ran in the same direction, especially in the 1950s and in the 1980s. The nuclear family, with a married couple and children at its core, remained the form of the family in which most people lived at every social level.23 The small family was a major site of socialization and acculturation, as well as a place of work and fun. It was a driving force behind the (desire for) mass consumerism that distinguishes postwar society.

29.3 The industrialization before de-industrialization

People on both sides of the Atlantic associate the postwar era with de-industrialization, yet in Europe it began with two decades of intensive industrialization. The postwar industrial expansion was without historical precedent.24 Industrialization was especially extensive in the two Germanys. Germany had an industrial economy, of course, before the First World War and over time became more industrial, with breaks during the Great Depression and postwar crisis. In late 1948, the West and East German economies entered a period of reconstruction that by 1952–1953 had become an industrial boom, concentrated (especially in the GDR) on heavy and basic industry, but also on other ‘producer goods’ such as metals, chemicals, and electronics. As measured by contribution to GDP, the secondary sector reached its pinnacle in both states in the 1960s. The GDR had hands-down the most industrialized economy in the Eastern Bloc. The FRG was ‘by far the most industrially oriented of all states in the European Economic Community in 1965.’ In West Germany, argues Werner Abelshauser, the boom was accompanied by a ‘deep change in attitudes toward industrialization.’ As the American occupiers anticipated, virtually everyone applauded a process that before 1933 alarmed not only landowners, but shopkeepers and civil servants. In East Germany the same change in attitude occurred instantly. Leaders of the ruling Socialist Unity party (SED) believed profoundly in the power of socialized industry to transform society.25

Click to view larger

Fig. 29.1 Employment by production sector (1950–2000).

Sources: Statistical Yearbook FRG 1960, 142 (West 1950); 1990, 20 (West 1960–89); 1994, 116 (1992); Statistical

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Yearbook GDR 1990, 19, 125, 128 (East 1949–89); Federal Office of Statistics (2000). Cited in: Rainer Geißler, Die Sozialstruktur Deutschlands. Die gesellschaftliche Entwicklung vor and nach der Vereinigung, 3rd ed.

Postwar agrarian employment shrank even more in the Germanys than in most other European countries. As rural laborers entered industrial employment, they contributed to a rise in the percentage of urban dwellers. The rise in the dependent (wage-earning) labor force looks even more dramatic if white-collar employment is added in. The service sector developed in tandem with industry. The expansion of tertiary employment was considerably smaller in the GDR than the FRG, although the West German service sector too employed relatively fewer workers than did many other Western industrial economies. Criss-crossing adjustment in employment by sector was a decline in the number of independent retailers and producers (Fig. 29.1). (p. 669) In the GDR, expropriation and collectivization forced a precipitous, politically-fraught decline of the ‘old Mittelstand’ and, somewhat later, of the family farm. As social processes, however, the reduction in rural employment, expansion of dependent labor, and increase in urbanization ran in parallel in West and East into the 1960s.26

After 1970, sector development diverged in the two Germanys. In West Germany, as the postwar boom came to an end, the size of the industrial workforce decreased absolutely and relatively.27 Service employment topped industrial employment, while the agricultural sector continued to shrink. In 1973, West Germany officially entered the age of ‘deindustrialization,’ alternatively called the ‘service economy’ or ‘post-industrial society.’ The shift, registered when industrial production accounted for less than 50 percent of GDP, occurred around the same time as in France and Italy, West Germany's fellow big boomers. In contrast, the UK, Germany's ‘early industrial’ counterpart, did not become officially post-industrial until the 1980s. The United States, of course, had long had a service economy. In 1990, the relative size of the West German industrial sector, concentrated as it was on exports, was slightly above (p. 670) average for the European Union and considerably bigger than Japan's or, especially, the United States' Its service sector remained smaller than in many West European countries and much smaller than in the United States. In the GDR, the socialist boom also ended at the end of the 1960s, but de-industrialization did not occur. The industrial workforce did not shrink nor did the service sector grow, and the decline in rural employment ground to a halt. The GDR entered, in other words, an era of economic stagnation that was more all-encompassing and long-lasting (It turned out to be permanent!) than the comparable ‘stagflation’ that afflicted Western market economies in the 1970s.28

29.4 The re-making of the working class

Capitalist or socialist, European lands hummed with industrial production in the 1950s and 1960s, creating, according to Hartmut Kaelble, a ‘world of workers.’ In the 1960s, half of all employed people in the FRG, and around 55 percent in the GDR were industrial workers.29 Whether called a ‘work society’ (Arbeitsgesellschaft) or ‘wage-earner society’ (Arbeitnehmergesellschaft), wage-earning was the predominant employment category, with blue-collar industrial workers the main wage-dependent group.30 During the boom, the composition and self-perception of the expanding industrial workforce became simultaneously more internally differentiated and less distinct from other social groups in both East and West. These trends contributed to the demise of workers' culture and, especially in the FRG, the dissolution of the proletarian milieu. These intersecting declines weakened, but did not sever the connection between social identity and occupational stratum in either society.

Early on, expanding industries in East and West hired heavily from the same ‘new’ categories: refugees and expellees, rural laborers, and non-employed or ‘family-assisting’ women. After initially converging, the gender and ethnic composition of the working class in the Germanys gradually diverged in the 1960s. A high percentage of women entered the industrial workforce in the GDR, whereas in the FRG women's employment did not increase appreciably until the 1980s. In West Germany, moreover, two groups joined the labor force in massive numbers: Germans who fled the GDR, and foreigners from Spain, Italy, Portugal, Yugoslavia, and Turkey who came to the FRG as ‘guest workers.’ Typically, the newly-mobilized groups entered industrial and/or blue-collar work, although many women took low-level white-collar jobs. Other European industrial workforces were also remade during the postwar boom. Virtually every economy mobilized rural labor for industry. Large numbers of women entered wage labor in many countries, but before 1960, no other European workforce integrated such large numbers of immigrants as did the Germanys—above all, the FRG. For decades, the FRG held first place in employment of immigrants.31

The majority of employed refugees/expellees in East and West ended up in the working-class, although less than twofifths were so employed before 1945. In 1950, (p. 671) almost three-quarters of them in the FRG labored as workers, mainly in industry. In their homelands one-third had been independently employed or assisting family members, but in

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1955 only 8 percent were so engaged. Compared with West German natives, they worked disproportionately for wages and as blue-collar workers into the 1970s. In industry, many (male) refugees or their children moved into skilled work in the 1960s. The occupational structures of refugees and natives converged only around 1980.32

In both economies, women moved into industrial manual labor out of domestic service and, especially, family-helper status. Women's ‘rate of employment’ hides this transfer from family labor into waged labor and, thus, masks a significant transition. It became much less likely for women to work under conditions of classic patriarchy as was the case in family businesses and in the agricultural sector, and as a result women's experience of manual labor became more like men's. Nevertheless, continuities in wome's experience of work prevailed, mainly in the type of industrial work they performed. With the exception of the electronics industry, women tended to concentrate in the same industrial branches as before 1945: textiles/garments, food and drink, and chemicals. In the GDR, gender segregation by industry and industrial occupation was definitely less pronounced than in the FRG, but not radically so. In both economies (as in other industrial economies) women worked overwhelmingly in unskilled or, later, semi-skilled positions.33 They earned from 30 to 40 percent less than male industrial workers, and they faced discrimination not only from employers and managers, but also from male workers. Considerable evidence on gender tensions on the East German shop floor reveals that male workers colluded with low-level trade union and SED functionaries to resist the feminization of the better-paid industrial branches and, above all, to oppose women as supervisors over men. Women's ‘intrusion’ presumably generated similar conflicts in the FRG, for analogous kinds of opposition have arisen wherever women move into ‘male’ jobs.34

In later decades, the profile of women's work diverged in East and West. Not only did more married mothers work for wages in the socialist East, but many more female workers gained skills. Forty-one percent of employed women in the GDR had a skilled diploma or educational degree by 1970. In West Germany, female blue-collar workers remained overwhelmingly unskilled or semi-skilled. As late as the year 2000, in united Germany, two-thirds of German female workers labored in unskilled and semi-skilled positions, in comparison to one-quarter of German male workers. In both societies, women's work in the home undermined their ability to advance occupationally or even hold a full-time job. Neither state nor economy effectively addressed, much less overcame, this fundamental social distinction whose significance is often discounted or even trivialized. The GDR's desperate need for women's wage labor did spur the SED to expand policies, if belatedly and inadequately, to decrease the double burden on women workers. Most significantly, the GDR expanded kindergartens to cover virtually all children aged three to five and extended crèches to encompass 80 percent of infants and toddlers.35

(p. 672) The number of foreign workers in the West German workforce began to increase after the economy reached full employment around 1955. This practice took off after the construction of the Berlin wall stopped the flow of East German migration. In 1970, foreign workers, the great majority of whom were men, comprised 16 percent of the wageearning workforce. When the ‘oil shock’ sent industrial employment into a tail spin in 1973–1974, the state enacted a (gradually circumvented) ‘stop’ to foreign recruitment. After that, many guest workers brought their families to the FRG. The vast majority of guest workers came from rural backgrounds and had no skills relevant to their employment in Germany. They rarely attained such skills, due to language barriers, the structure of apprenticeship programs, discrimination, and huge barriers to them attaining citizenship.36

Booming industry created a world of workers, but did not forge a unified workers' world in either Germany. Divisions had long existed between skilled and unskilled, heavy industrial and light industrial, factory and small shop workers, while structural differences intersected with culturally-constructed categories such as ‘women's work.’ In the postwar era, the spread of assembly lines, shift work, and piece work meant that the experience of manual labor became increasingly similar across industries, just as differences between skilled and unskilled or semi-skilled labor widened.37 As native male workers and, later, male refugees moved into the ranks of skilled, supervisory, and even managerial labor, this division between skilled and unskilled labor came to part more clearly along gender and ethnic lines, especially in the FRG, where the influx of guest workers allowed German male workers to move en masse into skilled labor and salaried work.38 Taken together, these developments created a West German industrial working class that by the 1970s was a ‘fully different ensemble of social formations’ than in 1933.39

The new ensemble made sense of ‘wage labor’ in notably heterogeneous ways.40 Refugees were bunched in the working class, but did not tend to interpret their situation in class terms. Indeed, they were notably anti-Communist. In the FRG, many joined trade unions and voted Social Democratic, but their status as refugees carried more emotional resonance than did workplace identity. Their marked orientation toward selfand family-advancement percolated into the wider shop floor culture.41 Women workers too did not fit the classic mold of workplace culture. Due to their experience

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of laboring for and in the family, they were much likelier than men to harbor a dual commitment to paid and unpaid labor. Men saw themselves as the family breadwinner, but labor in the family shaped their identity very little. Women's employment, in contrast, was often subject to their labor in the family. They were less likely than men to identify waged work as their life mission, although female workers cared about compensation and conditions. Male workers often discouraged female participation in shop floor organizations, but then criticized women as apathetic and lacking solidarity. Even wider was the distance between the social milieus of West German workers and foreign workers. The wide gulf was exposed when native workers cried ‘Ausländer raus!’ as unemployment rose during the recession of 1966–1967. (p. 673) Antagonism flared again during the long downturn of the 1970s—and periodically ever after.42

Native male workers had formed the core of Germany's organized workers' culture and broader proletarian milieu. Elements of this working-class world survived Nazi repression and war. In the GDR, industrial strongholds of pre-Nazi Arbeiterkultur were the centers of the massive strike wave in June 1953 against SED labor and consumption policies.43 Militancy and shop floor culture in West German mines and foundries in the early 1950s demonstrated traditional forms of solidarity.44 By the 1960s, ‘classic’ shop floor culture had eroded in both states in part due to the decline of Arbeiterkultur. In the West, Social Democrats decided not to revive workers' cultural organizations. In the East, the SED suffocated autonomous forms of sociability and ‘encouraged’ participation in its ‘mass organizations.’ In contrast, oppositional Communist parties in postwar Italy and, especially, France constructed an elaborate workers' culture that looked a lot like pre-1933 Arbeiterkultur. This difference may illuminate why West German workers and unions called fewer and less militant strikes than French and Italian workers during the economic troubles that affected all of Europe around 1970. Unlike French and Italian workers, West German workers also did not join student protesters during ‘1968,’ although students in West Berlin were as rebellious as in Paris and Milan.45

By the late 1970s, organized workers' culture and the proletarian milieu were in decline throughout Western Europe. They deteriorated, Kaelble posits, because workers no longer needed physical, psychological, or cultural sustenance from the workers' movement.46 Full employment, rising wages, improved benefits, and the ‘safety net’ of social policies overcame their sense of vulnerability, isolation, and inferiority, contributing to a ‘deproletarianization’ of the working class. As the ratio of workers decreased relative to white-collar employees, European society became less proletarian from a social-structural perspective as well. Of course, one could argue that white-collar work was becoming proletarianized. By 1960, most low-level white-collar employees were female, meaning that the status of retail and clerical work had declined. Their pay was low and many worked in factory-like offices. Yet, if this meant they were proletarians, they did not want to know about it. White-collar female employees looked down on their blue-collar counterparts.47

In the GDR, a version of the traditional proletarian milieu survived into the 1980s, in part because industrial workers remained a huge block of the employed population and in part because the SED lionized industrial workers and manual labor, and the production brigade, the GDR's ubiquitous work-unit collective, nurtured a workplace identity.48 Countervailing trends, however, altered the proletarian milieu. The movement of large numbers of workers into skilled labor enhanced job satisfaction, social policies benefited workers, full employment created security and better living standards directed attention toward consumption.49 As in the west, the East German worker's milieu did not respond adaptively to a feminizing workforce. However, there were also conditions particular to socialism that undermined a milieu whose classic form was intertwined with oppositional workers' organizations—which the SED had repressed (p. 674) or brought ‘into line.’ As production brigades forged small-group solidarity (and higher quotas) through production competitions, worker loyalties tended to fragment, and dissent was atomized and strongly inflected by Eigen-Sinn (selfconstructed meaning). The absence of major strikes after 1953 signified this waning of the classic proletarian milieu. In socialist Poland, in contrast, industrial protest and cooperative dissent by workers and students became more public and better organized over time. Effective repression in the GDR only partially explains the difference. In autumn 1989, when demonstrations swept the GDR and brought down the wall, industrial workers participated as individuals, not as members of a self-conscious group.50

If the social identity of East German industrial workers weakened more than one might have predicted in a ‘labor society,’ the group identity of West German workers paled less than one might have expected in a ‘social-market society.’ In 2001, a poll found that 70 percent of skilled workers and 80 percent of unskilled and semi-skilled workers identified themselves as members of the ‘worker-stratum’ (Arbeiterschicht). The participation of former East Germans probably influenced these numbers. Yet in the old Federal Republic, too, workers articulated a labor-associated identity. In 1972, two out of three workers still voted for the SPD; and in the late 1970s, a majority of workers found the division of wealth in the FRG ‘unjust.51 The trend was not nationally specific, however. Throughout Europe, argues Kaelble, compensation,

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safety, promotion, work climate, and ‘voice’ remained of great concern to workers and employees. Increasingly, though, workers and employees are articulating workplace interests through individual complaints more than by organized conflict—suggesting, ironically, that western workers are following a path carved by workers in the GDR.52

29.5 Evidence of social division: comparing boats

The degree and meaning of social inequality in the GDR and FRG (and other rich industrial countries) are contested issues. Critics of the panglossian cheerleaders for either the East or the West have gathered data on income, social mobility, and education that reveal both surprising internal inconsistencies and German-German similarities. In both societies income gaps narrowed and social mobility accelerated somewhat in the 1950s and 1960s, but not later. Neither state addressed class-based educational disparities as effectively as supporters asserted. After the 1960s, both made major strides toward closing the gendered educational gap. Each society had its elites. Beneath the sharp contrasts in their composition and wealth, one can identify a unifying trend: educated elites gained status and influence relative to propertied elites in East and West.53

The rising tide of prosperity has distracted public and scholarly attention, according to Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others, from an ‘astounding’ and ‘striking’ stability in the (p. 675) gap between rich and poor in West Germany. In 1950, the top quintile of households earned 45 percent of the national income; in 1985, they earned 44 percent. In 1950, the bottom quintile earned 5.4 percent, while in 1985, they received 7.4 percent. The distribution of wealth showed an even steeper slope. In 1986, the top 12 percent of households owned 60 percent of national property/assets, while the bottom 30 percent owned only 1.5 percent of wealth. Monetary assets rose among all groups, but the uneven distribution of assets between top and bottom, on the one hand, and between dependent and independent labor, on the other, shifted little between 1949 and 1989. Studies conclude that the rich grew richer from the late 1970s on, erasing most of the relative gains made by the lower quintiles in the 1950s and 1960s. The concentration of wealth was associated with an increasing concentration of business ownership. The Federal Republic's distribution of income and wealth stands in the middle of the spectrum whether the comparative pool is Western economies or members of the European Union. Many post-industrial economies saw the ‘scissors’ close somewhat up to 1975, only to open again since then. The income gap is less yawning in the FRG than in the US or Canada, yet German ownership of assets is more concentrated at the top of the pyramid than in Sweden, the UK, or the US.54

In the GDR, expropriation of property and businesses of all types and sizes dramatically flattened the distribution of wealth. The allocation of income was also much more equal than in the West. The state tilted wages toward industrial workers relative to white-collar employees, on the one hand, and slanted tax and social benefits to wage-earners relative to the small number of independently employed East Germans, on the other. East German workers earned 64 percent of what West German blue-collar workers did, whereas East German white-collar employees earned only 47 percent of their West German counterparts.55

As did virtually all of Europe, East and West Germany significantly expanded universities and other institutions of higher learning between 1949 and 1989, and in the process became massively better educated. Both societies equalized access to secondary education, if at different points and to different degrees, and the expansion of tertiary education delivered major pay-offs in income and social standing in both states, so that strong correlations developed between higher education, distribution of income, social mobility, and the definition of elites. In the FRG, all social layers benefited from the expansion of education, but the middle and upper strata benefited more. Access to higher education for working-class children made a significant leap in the 1960s in the wake of reforms in secondary education. Since then, worker-children's access to college-prep high schools has expanded, but not as rapidly as in the 1960s, especially in contrast to that of the children of white-collar employees and civil servants. In 1950, the percentage of worker-children at university was 6 percent; it rose to 16.9 percent in 1970 and has since stagnated at around 15 percent. By some measures of international comparison, educational achievement in the Federal Republic remains unusually socially stratified. In 2000, the gap in the reading achievement of fifteen-year-olds from the lowest and highest quarters of the population was wider in (p. 676) the FRG than any other OECD country. The gap in reading scores of children from immigrant and native families was second widest in the FRG.56

The GDR expanded higher education to train a ‘socialist intelligentsia.’ In 1950, only 6 percent of the employed population had a higher degree, while in 1989, 22 percent did. The SED moved from two directions to level the expanding educational field. In the 1950s, the party made it easier for working-class children to enter university. At the

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same time, it discriminated heavily against children from ‘bourgeois’ backgrounds. The percentage of worker-children among students rose impressively. As early as the 1960s however, children of the new socialist intelligentsia and of old ‘bourgeois’ families shot ahead in university attendance. In 1988, only 7 percent of university students in the GDR were worker-children. This reversal took place after the state stopped actively promoting ‘affirmative action.’ As in the FRG, teacher bias hurt the chances of worker-children. Blue-collar parents tended to accept teacher evaluations of their children while educated parents in both states insisted on university education for their children. In the GDR, from 1970 onward, university attendance was highly correlated with an educated mother—and East German mothers were likelier than West German mothers to have a university degree. In the GDR, the university system as a whole stagnated in the 1980s. Whereas in 1960, 10 percent of East German youth versus 6 percent of West German youth studied at a university or advanced technical school, in 1988 the ratio was 20 percent in West Germany and 14 percent in the GDR.57

The GDR addressed educational discrimination against girls earlier and more aggressively than did the FRG. Girls' rate of graduation from Eastern college-prep schools (Erweiterte Oberschule) topped the male rate by the 1960s. In the FRG girls surpassed boys' rate of graduation from gymnasium only in the early 1980s. East German women's attendance at university drew even with men's in the 1970s and moved ahead in the 1980s. In the ‘old’ FRG, enrollment at universities was still less than 50 percent female in 2000, in contrast to most other European countries, the United States, and the ‘new federal states.’ In both the West and the East, young women at university were even likelier than young men to have parents who were already educated. Working-class parents tended to discourage girls' education more than they did boys'. 58

Occupational opportunity within and across generations in the FRG was quite dynamic. Still, upward social mobility was not as common in the 1950s as the trope of the ‘self-made man’ would suggest. The data are difficult to evaluate, but suggest that social mobility was most widespread in the 1960s. Correct in the stereotype of the ‘self-made-man’ was, however, the gender of mobility: it was predominately male. As the boom came to an end and educational reform stalled, occupational and income mobility slowed. Yet the shift from the industrial to the service economy drew the next generation heavily into white-collar employment—and society overall was ‘re-stratified’ upward. The typical step in the 1950s and 1960s was by unskilled male Germans into skilled positions, while in the 1970s and 1980s skilled workers typically moved into low-level management, higher-level office jobs, and the civil service. Family background molded children's chances in many ways, including, but not limited to (p. 677) financial means. Social circles too swayed ambitions and provided connections. Sociability was quite closed, as two-thirds of worker-children married workerchildren. Despite structural and cultural obstacles to mobility, the FRG was, Rainer Geißler concludes, a society with ‘notably high upward generational mobility’ for native men, due to full employment and demand for skilled labor and, later, to the shift toward higher education and service jobs.59

The GDR was characterized by high levels of both upward and downward mobility in the 1950s. Workers and employees trained to move into the thousands of skilled and professional positions left open by doctors, teachers, engineers, and all that migrated to the West. After 1960, the GDR experienced a general rise in education and qualification levels and, thus, the whole society re-stratified upward. The economy did not, however, enter the service phase after 1970 and so the upward rotation of society as a whole stopped. A stagnant social structure reproduced itself—thus, blocking upward mobility for lower social groups and younger people. In 1977, three-quarters of workers came from a family in which the father was a worker. As in the FRG, women did not fare as well as men, even though the gendered gap in social mobility was less wide because women gained higher levels of skill and education. Communism in Eastern Europe, concludes Göran Therborn, improved the equality of opportunity relative to Western Europe, but not to either North America or Japan.60

Elites in the FRG experienced modification within stability, whereas East German elites evinced resilience within transformation. Gentile elites survived the war, shaken, but not undone by material and human losses. The FRG revived the career civil service with more or less the same personnel as before 1945. Many lawyers and almost all doctors (re)founded private practices. Three-quarters of the pre-1945 membership of company boards and other leading business institutions stayed in the same positions. Nonetheless, elite political loyalties evolved quickly and quite dramatically. The anti-democratic, anti-republican revanchism that characterized bourgeois circles after World War I did not revive. Employers negotiated with trade unions; academics forgot their earlier disdain for industry and commercialism, and professional and employer associations tenaciously represented group interests, but did so within the give-and-take of parliamentary deal-making. Elites, in summary, embraced the ‘Bonn republic.’ Culturally, the bourgeois milieu adapted less rapidly. German liberal values of education and self-improvement became only gradually less patriarchal, exclusive, and parochial as lower social strata adopted them and as they took on some of the freer spirit of Anglo-American

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liberalism. Rather than express itself so blatantly as earlier, elite taste articulated itself as fine distinctions in dress, leisure, and opinion. Socially, the bürgerliche milieu changed quite slowly. Initially, even the economic and academic elites comingled little, not to speak of recruiting from the lower orders. As the size of the business and educational elites expanded, though, they began to draw members from other elites and even from ‘lower’ circles.61

In the East, the leadership of the Communist party—the new political elite—imprisoned or drove out the old propertied and political elites. It needed, however, the expertise of physicians, accountants, scientists, engineers, and professors; thus, the (p. 678) old academic elite survived and, even after a socialist intelligentsia arose, maintained a place in East Germany's ‘niche society.’ The SED did not like the bourgeoisie, but it greatly respected and cultivated pre-twentieth- century bourgeois culture. For these and other reasons, recent scholarship suggests, East German society was not truly ‘de-differentiated’ or atomized, but maintained social distinctions and milieus.62

29.6 Sources of social cohesion: the rising tide

Given the persistence of social inequality, why have West German social relations been calm since 1945 in contrast to earlier? The societal perspective concedes the cushioning effects of prosperity, but also notes the impact of redistributive tax and social policies.63 The optimist school squarely credits the rising tide, arguing absolute prosperity trumped social comparison. The vast majority of West Germans earned enough money, benefits, and free time to partake of an ever increasing quantity and variety of goods, services, and leisure activities. Mass consumption of goods and massproduced culture nourished, in turn, a convergence of tastes and even life styles. Convergence did more than deflect social comparison, according to the optimists. It actually diminished the usefulness of social position as a standpoint from which to evaluate society. Throughout Western Europe life styles were simultaneously individuated and ‘nationalized’ or even internationalized as options expanded in all senses of the word.64

West German prosperity had the opposite effect on East Germans. It provoked them to social comparison—with West Germans. East German sensitivity to the German-German gap in prosperity irked the SED leadership, for it acted as a quite literal magnet before the construction of the Berlin wall and remained psychologically mesmerizing afterwards.

Under Erich Honecker, the Politburo tried, but failed to meet popular consumption needs and desires, at least in part to counteract this pull. The widening gap in the standard of living after 1980 fostered an ever sharper consciousness of social imbalance between East and West. This consciousness, many studies have argued, contributed to the most stunning upheaval in postwar German history: the Revolution that brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Although not wrong, the claim concerning East German consciousness of disparity is incomplete. It focuses exclusively on the rough beginning and declining end of GDR living standards, and it considers the GDR only in comparison to the FRG, rather than also to itself. An internally-focused, longer-term perspective shows that the standard of living and, in its wake, consumption increased significantly for several decades.65 It suggests, moreover, that mass consumption bolstered social and political stability between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s.

West Germany's national income increased thirteen times faster between 1950 and 1980 than it had in the same region of Germany between 1900 and 1950. Confirming (p. 679) that people toward the bottom of the income scale benefitted from this rise, the net earnings of worker/employees rose 3.2 times between 1950 and 1979. Even scholars who adopt the critical societal perspective recognize that unprecedented prosperity not only improved people's lives, but colored their perception of society and their social prospects. In the GDR, the glass of prosperity looks different depending on the angle of observation. The rise in the standard of living was very impressive there too, especially compared with the immediate postwar era. Yet, as we all know, the glass looks half empty if compared with the much greater rise in West Germany. In 1960, the difference in average household income was 30 percent; in 1970, it was 40 percent; in the early 1980s, it stood at 55 percent. If measured in cash assets, the distribution of wealth was even more unequal.66

Studies of postwar consumption often employ the metaphor of the wave, especially in reference to West Germany. They describe progressive ‘waves’ of food, fashion, consumer durables and interior design, automobiles, and travel.67 The wave imagery, the historian Michael Wildt argues, evokes a natural phenomenon, rather than pointing to social decisions —and family negotiations—about how to spend hard-earned wages. Along with Mooser, Wildt dates the shift from inelastic need toward elastic need later than do most scholars. Workers were eating more and better food before 1955, certainly, but only around 1960 did they begin to redefine ‘need’ to encompass goods once considered luxuries.68 This redefinition was the critical cultural shift that, in turn, altered social perceptions, according to Kaelble. Mass consumption, he suggests, began to reshape class society in Europe when many high-value goods, like televisions and cars, crossed from

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